Quake 3 for iPod Touch / iPhone — The time has finally come. Games like Quake 3 are hitting the iPhone platform. It is particularly cool to see the accelerometers being used to control the action. — Bonus points for controlling 2 players at once. — Apple's new gaming platform looks to be shaping up quite nicely.

Quake 3 + iTouch — So we've been playing around with Quake 3 and Apple's iTouch. Scott grabbed the icculus source and with a few modifications had it running pretty quick. Here's a video of him with two iTouch's in multiplayer.

Source: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service — Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch. There are also rumors that press is being pre-briefed on the product, although we haven't been contacted by Google.

Gartner: Open source will quietly take over — In a few years' time, almost all businesses will use open source, according to Gartner; even though IT managers may be unaware of it, and prefer to talk about fashions such as software as a service. — Open-source promoters have welcomed …

Microsoft losing patience with Yahoo? — Microsoft is evaluating its Yahoo acquisition bid under the theory that the Internet company may have lost value since the $44.6 billion offer was made, according to a Reuters report this afternoon, citing an anonymous source.

Powerset Will Launch In Coming Weeks — San Francisco based Powerset will be publicly launching a long-awaited beta version of the service in the coming weeks, the company told me yesterday. They are working on a new kind of search engine that will understand natural language searches …

Lawyer Who Threatened File-Sharers is Banned For 6 months — A lawyer who sent out hundreds of thousands of threatening letters demanding that alleged file-sharers pay 400 euros, has been banned from operating for 6 months. Elizabeth Martin, who had been working with Swiss anti-piracy outfit …

Kinder, Gentler C&Ds Please — I'm getting some well-deserved flak for a ham-handed cease-and-desist email I sent to a blogger recently. The dialogue had remained cordial until he revealed his business model - running deceptive textads such as the ones below, which got on my nerves:

The Phorm “Webwise” System — Last week I spent several hours at Phorm learning how their advertising system works — this is the system that is to be deployed by the UK's largest ISPs to pick apart your web browsing activities to try and determine what interests you.

Companies struggle as Safari pops up on networks — Network administrators are complaining that Apple's recent decision to offer users its Safari Web browser as part of an iTunes and QuickTime update has made their lives harder as they struggle to remove the software from PCs on their networks.

Blogonomics: Valleywag Pay Slashed — Jordan Golson can't be happy: Nick Denton has cut the amount of money he gets per thousand pageviews to $6.50 from $9.75. That's a 33% pay cut, on a per-pageview basis. What about on an absolute basis? — Well, the pageview rate is set on the basis of the previous quarter's pageviews.

Huge Microsoft patent loss is a partial win — A federal jury in San Diego this afternoon awarded $367.4 million to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute with Microsoft. It ranks among the biggest patent verdicts in U.S. history, but it could have been worse: Alcatel-Lucent had been seeking $1.75 billion.